"Turned Out to Be a Terribly Bad Idea"

"How did we get here? To answer that, you have to go back to 1986 and the work of an eccentric and powerful California politician, John 'Vasco' Vasconcellos. That year, the Democrat Vasconcellos managed to persuade a deeply sceptical Republican state governor to fund a three-year task force to explore the value of self-esteem. Vasco was convinced that low self-esteem was the source of a huge array of social issues, including unemployment, educational failure, child abuse, domestic violence, homelessness and gang warfare. He became convinced that raising the population’s self-esteem would act as a 'social vaccine', saving the state billions.                                                                                                                     "But Vasco's plan backfired spectacularly, with the fallout lasting to this day. I spent a year trying to find out why–and discovered that there was, at the heart of his project, a lie."

The Guardian runs an excerpt from Will Stor's Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed And What It’s Doing To Us.